by Lily S

Created on: October 24, 2008

Anyone can create a very good website or blog, but the real challenge is getting people to visit it. The best traffic comes from search engines like Google, but Google ranks websites and webpages according to the number of incoming links the site has.

One way to build up links to your site is to write short articles that market your site and and includes a link to the site. There are various different types of articles you can write. For example, you can produce a straightforward review of the website in question with the link placed on the keyword you want associated with the site. Or you could work a little harder and write a general article about as aspect of the site, and work the link in on the appropriate keyword - say your website markets jewellery, you could write an article about the history of cameo jewellery and then link to the place in your site that sells that type of jewellery. The title of the article is extremely important, as the search engines pay particular attention to it.

Once you have written your article, you then need to submit it to an article directory. The leader is Ezine Articles, which is free to join. However be aware that they will vet every article you submit, and they will place ads in the article, but will not share profits. You could also write your article on Helium now that Helium allow you to embed links.

Try to write a fresh article each time you submit. Some article marketers simply submit the same article to different directories, but Google doesn't like duplicate content and will penalise you for it. How many articles do you need to write before you start to have an effect? At least ten. But some experienced article marketers have written hundreds and sometimes thousands. It all depends on how much time you have. Because of the need to make each article unique and of good quality, I would start low and build up.

Once you have submitted the article, then work on publicising the article. One of the best ways to do this is to put the URL in your signature when you post on forums. And if someone picks up the article and submits it to the social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious and Reddit, so much the better. The more back links the articles have, the more link juice they will be able to pass on to the website link you have embedded in the article.

The above sounds like a lot of work, but most of it is done at the beginning. Once you have got a portfolio of articles linking to your site, and have ensured that all the articles themselves rank well on Google, you are well on your way to getting steady and quality traffic to your website.

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